Musical Worlds of Yogyakarta

by Max M Richter

Publication Year: 2012

Musical Worlds in Yogyakarta is an ethnographic account of a vibrant Indonesian city during the turbulent early post-Soeharto years. The book examines musical performance in public contexts ranging from the street and neighbourhood through to commercial venues and state environments such as Yogyakarta's regional parliament, its military institutions, universities and the Sultan's palace. It focuses on the musical tastes and practices of street workers, artists, students and others. From street-corner jam sessions to large-scale concerts, a range of genres emerge that cohere around notions of campursari (mixed essences) and jalanan (of the street). Musical worlds addresses themes of social identity and power, counterpoising Pierre Bourdieu's theories on class, gender and nation with the author's alternative perspectives of inter-group social capital, physicality and grounded cosmopolitanism. The author argues that Yogyakarta is exemplary of how everyday people make use of music to negotiate issues of power and at the same time promote peace and intergroup appreciation in culturally diverse inner-city settings.

Cover

Title Page, Copyright

Contents

Acknowledgements

First and foremost I wish to thank my wife and partner, Dr. Tina
Kalivas, for her love and support through the long process from
planning my doctoral fieldwork to completing this monograph.
Secondly I would like to thank my PhD supervisor, Professor Joel S.
Kahn, for his invaluable advice and guidance, ...

Glossary of special terms

Introduction: Approaching musical life in early post-Soeharto Yogyakarta

By four o’clock the midday heat has begun to mellow. Along kampung
alleyways the raucous commotion of city life gives way to the occasional
sounds of playing children, splashing water, cooing pigeons.
Domestic life emanates crisply out of thin walls and open windows. ...

Part 1: Music and the Street

Background

On Saturday night in Yogyakarta, the fourth of August 2001, the
full moon cast iridescence through the city lights. Thousands of
Indonesians, cashed up after their monthly payday, were further
cramming the bustling city centre. Preparations for Independence
Day added to the fanfare. ...

1. Sosrowijayan and its Street Workers

In Yogyakarta’s Sosrowijayan neighbourhood, ‘village-like’ kampung
conventions intermingle with urban dynamism. Sosrowijayan
is bordered by Marlioboro Street to the east and the city’s central
railway station to the north (see Map to Part One). It accommodates
the majority of Yogyakarta’s ‘sloppily dressed western tourists’
(Mulder 1996:180) ...

2. Musical Forms and Spaces

The ‘acoustic panorama of the Indonesian city’ (Colombijn
2007:269) is both distinctive and under-theorized. In Yogyakarta’s
Sosrowijayan, music and the broader ‘soundscape’ (Shafer 1977)
were integral to the roadside/alleyway division outlined in the
previous chapter. ...

3. Music Groups

Many musical performances that project across public space are
socially inclusive. But as Martin Stokes (1994:9) reminds us, so
too can the crashing sound of one group be a deliberate ploy to
enforce the boundaries between groups. Such inclusive and exclusive
ploys and their effects also featured ...

Conclusion

I began Part One with a description of street guides making themselves
at home in a becak drivers’ roadside hangout. I then proposed
that identifying capital in its various guises helps to gain an understanding
of the roles of music making in the maintenance of peaceful
inter-group relations social relations in Yogyakarta, ...

Part 2: Habitus and Physicality

Background

For some years now I have often heard Yogyakarta’s Sosrowijayan
neighbourhood described as either a ‘typically conservative kampung’
or a ‘tourist ruined commercial zone’. In Part One I sought
to problematise this division by examining music making and capital
conversions among becak drivers and street guides. ...

4. Detachment Engagement

The kampung and commercial-venue sections of this chapter both
begin with events featuring extremely immobile participants. This,
I will argue, was primarily a result of levels of formality and economic
disparity respectively. Other events in these settings involved
transitions into greater inter-gender engagement, ...

5. Other Worlds and Sexualisation

In contrast to detachment engagement transitions, the musical events
in this chapter reveal ways in which gender and other social boundaries
were negotiated in situations of intensified musical physicality
(Cowan 1990; McIntosh 2010). More specifically, the other worlds
and sexualisation forms of musical physicalisation ...

Conclusion

In Part Two, I have classified music performances that took place
in Yogyakarta’s kampung and commercial entertainment venues
according to detachment engagement, other worlds and sexualisation
forms of musical physicalisation. Musical performance created
arenas in which gender and other aspects of identity were
negotiated, ...

Part 3: State Power and Musical Cosmopolitanism

Background

It is for good reason that many academic studies of Indonesia
centre on the nation-state. Historically, as Benedict Anderson
(1990:41-5) explains, in the Indonesia/Malay world the term
negari designates both a capital city and a kingdom, reflecting
centuries of empires and statehood in the region. ..

6. Regional Parliament

During the New Order period, Indonesia’s political structure
extended from central government to province, regency/municipality,
sub-district, and finally the kampung levels of sub-ward and
neighbourhood association. Changes following Soeharto’s fall in
1998 had profound consequences for this complex structure. ...

7. Armed Forces

A key feature of the modern state is its monopoly of the legitimate
use of violence, with its military and police forces the main instruments
(Pierson 1996; Cohen and Service 1978). Military institutions
are therefore central to the constitution of the bureaucratic
field. ...

8. Universities

Universities and education systems more broadly are key sites for
the struggles to control and reproduce statist capital (Bourdieu
and Wacquant 1992:114-5). Entrance to the game of cultural capital
accumulation is determined in the first instance through competitive
recruitment examinations. ...

Conclusion

Public events involving musical performance at Yogyakarta’s state
institutions in 2001 tended to produce discernible combinations
of struggles for statist capital with practices I have described as
grounded and cosmopolitan. At the Regional Parliament on Malioboro
Street, cosmopolitanism and political practice were manifest ...

Conclusion: Campursari and Jalanan at the Sultan’s Palace

In this monograph I have sought to construct a framework through
which to analyse musical performance and social relations as I
observed them in early post-Soeharto Yogyakarta. To achieve this, I
drew on Bourdieu’s concepts of capital, habitus and field, and counterpoised
these with the alternative perspectives of inter-group social
capital, ...

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